Mercury Rev Bring New Album To Australia

With new album The Light in You set for release on October 2, Mercury Rev have announced their first Australian headline shows since 2002: the revered US indie rockers will play Max Watt’s in Melbourne on Tuesday 8 December and Brisbane’s The Zoo on Friday 11 December.

The Light in You – preceded by the single ‘Are You Ready?’, which you can stream above – is the band’s first album since 2008’s Snowflake Midnight and their first since signing with Bella Union. It reflects a particularly turbulent era in the lives of Grasshopper and fellow co-founder Jonathan Donahue, with the latter explaining, ““It was one of those otherworldly life sequences, when everything you think is solid turns molten”.

The album was recorded by the band themselves in their basement studio in the Catskills, and was partly inspired by the headlining sets they played to celebrate the deluxe re-release of their 1998 opus, Deserter’s Songs.

“Playing tracks again from Deserter’s Songs helped us look at where we’ve been, and where we were going,” says Grasshopper. “Though by no means did we want to make Deserter’s Songs Two, we did feel we had some loose ends to tie up.”